ElectricFlow vs GitLab

GitLab compared to other DevOps tools

Electric Cloud ElectricFlow is a platform which provides deployment automation, release orchestration, and DevOps insights to help organizations deliver better software faster. The base platform (formerly known as Electric Commander) is used by many organizations to automate their CI/CD pipelines.

Although Electric Cloud claims complete end to end DevOps, the platform requires a lot of integration to other tools in the tool chain in order to supplement functionality, as do just about all CI/CD point tools. In contrast, GitLab come pre-integrated with fundamental and extended functionality built-in across the DevOps lifecycle. An example is with security tools, where other CI/CD vendors such as Electric Cloud claim DevSecOps, they merely integrate to 3rd party security tools and maybe provide a dashboard. GitLab comes with many security scanning capabilities built-in

FEATURES

Environments and deployments

GitLab CI is capable of not only testing or building your projects, but also deploying them in your infrastructure, with the added benefit of giving you a way to track your deployments. Environments are like tags for your CI jobs, describing where code gets deployed.

Developers and QA can deploy to their own environments on demand while production stays locked down. Build engineers and ops teams spend less time servicing deploy requests, and can gate what goes into production.

Environments history allows you to see what is currently being deployed on your servers, and to access a detailed view for all the past deployments. From this list you can also re-deploy the current version, or even rollback an old stable one in case something went wrong.

GitLab Runner supports Linux operating systems on ARM architectures and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy for Linux ARM based projects by leveraging shell scripts and command line tools.

When development teams are spread across two or more geographical locations, but their GitLab instance is in a single location, fetching and cloning large repositories can take a long time. Built for distributed teams, GitLab Geo allows for read-only mirrors of your GitLab instance, reducing the time it takes to clone and fetch large repos and improving your collaboration process.

GitLab Premium ships with Deploy Boards offering a consolidated view of the current health and status of each CI/CD environment running on Kubernetes. The status of each pod of your latest deployment is displayed seamlessly within GitLab without the need to access Kubernetes.

GitLab can allow you to deploy a new version of your app on Kubernetes starting with just a few pods, and then increase the percentage if everything is working fine. This can be configured to proceed per a schedule or to pause for input to proceed.

Two-factor authentication secures your account by requiring a second confirmation, in addition to your password. That second step means your account stays secure even if your password is compromised. The ability to enforce 2FA provides further security by making sure all users are using it.

IP Whitelisting defines safe IP network addresses from which clients can access and interact with the repository server. This helps prevent unwanted third parties from accessing your account even if they have acquired a team member’s email address and password.